What I've tasted of desire
by Sarah Koh
Summary: Sasuke's wrist is bruised from the strength of Naruto's grip, but he has stopped caring.


Sasuke's wrist is bruised from the strength of Naruto's grip, but he has stopped caring. Instead he twists his arm and his skin rubs red, abraded from the callused pads of Naruto's fingers, and still he cannot break free. Naruto came to him - instinct calling him, perhaps; it's hard to tell, these days, who Naruto is - and found Sasuke fully-dressed even though the sun had died hours ago. Halfway out the window with the guards unconscious and still no surprise at the hand that clamped around his wrist to shackle him.

(When Sasuke is young but no longer anyone's child, his heart begins to sing and he follows the noise until he stands on a hill. Then someone strides towards him, with brother's face and father's voice and mother's hands. Heavy gold eyes, thick and melting: he has never seen them before but they are familiar.

_I never would have taken you for one of mine_, the man-woman says. No kindness in the eyes that could never be human. It presses a long fingernail to the babyish softness of Sasuke's bottom lip and lowers its face to kiss Sasuke's mouth. _But you are_, says the woman-man, _and my mark will remain._

What do you want? Sasuke demands when it releases him and the impression of its hands on his shoulders are only ghosts.

_Everything_, it replies and somehow this is fair. A lovely, smoky curl of its lips. _What else is there to want?_

For years, his mouth will hurt from the kiss that has scorched his throat and cauterized capillaries and blood vessels in its path, that has curled tight around his heart and filled all the wounds left from brother's deceitful sword until he is consumed and whole.

The Uchiha have always preferred the flames.

It laughs and over its bare shoulder Sasuke can see a woman with broken-glass eyes: and he knows her too.)

"Let me go," he says when violence has stopped working, because Sasuke has always used words as a last resort. He knows the thrust of a body against his as he drives a sword into a stomach, the scream of someone's punch against his sternum. But now he feels desperation bleeding the edges of his mind as despair approaches with sanguine-colored footsteps. His mind fills with dying _Canis vulpes_ in a trap set by prey, and still it fights.

"No," Naruto says, and his voice is so calm but his fingers will not let go as if he intends to break bones to keep Sasuke in place. "You came back. You can't leave again."

He makes things sound so simple because he wants them to be.

Sasuke wrenches his wrist and tries again and again like he will pull off his own arm to be set free.

Naruto only holds on tighter and pulls Sasuke closer.

His eyes are not the color of the sunrise but of the sunset and there are almost tails wavering in the air behind him and still - still, Sasuke cannot think of anything but his brother's face and sunrise eyes and the road that stretches ahead of him and how far he has to go.

This is the nature of desire: it is all-consuming and blind in a way that love is not, and when it burns men burn too. Sasuke is not yet a man, caught awkwardly and painfully in the stage between, but he only burns the brighter for this. The young are sweeter, they shine more. Love has nothing to do with it: love burned out when he found he could not cry.

Naruto says, "If you say you'll come back, I'll help you. I'll help you kill Itachi."

Sasuke cannot explain: that is not what he wants. It is not Itachi's death or Itachi's love that he wants but Itachi. He does not know what he wants with his brother but he wants him, all the same, with the childish and implacable desire that has eaten everything inside him that might have loved Naruto and Sakura and Kakashi.

Instead he laughs and throws a punch at Naruto that isn't too bad even though his skin peels at being so close to the violent, bestial chakra and his mobility remains limited at being trapped in Naruto's grip. He can _feel_ Naruto's fingernails growing and drawing blood from his skin and even so fear barely exists. That has been eaten too.

His punch connects on Naruto's cheek with a solid _thunk_ that makes Naruto stagger backward and he pulls Sasuke down and pins him against the floor with his knee digging into Sasuke's stomach and his breath right over the delicate junction between neck and shoulder just above the collarbone, butterfly-soft and hell-hot, like a promise. Sasuke pushes _up_, and somehow Naruto still hasn't let go and Sasuke feels the crack before he hears it. The electric shiver that races up his arm.

This isn't the first time he's broken a bone, and it means even less.

Naruto doesn't seem to notice, just looks at him with those eyes that are almost yellow in the dark lights -

And finally Sasuke sees the twin shine on Naruto's mouth.

"Stay," Naruto says and his eyes are feverish and feral. "I'll give you anything you want, I'll do anything you want -"

Sasuke would laugh, if the joke weren't on him.


End file.
